Peter Stanley

Thirty-odd years ago the great popular hero of the Great War was the Digger – a legendary figure, mostly anonymous, who exemplified endurance, courage, and above all, mateship: think Albert Facey​ or John Simpson. Today the representative Great War figures are Victoria Cross recipients such as Albert Jacka​ and generals like John Monash. What does that say about the way the Great War centenary is presented to us?

Over the past 30 years or so we have seen a string of books about Monash, starting well with Geoff Serle's 1982 biography, ably complemented by Peter Pedersen's Monash as Military Commander. Over the past decade we've had Roland Perry's Monash: the Outsider Who Won a War (neither claim sustainable) and Tim Fischer's Maestro (a tendentious plea for a belated field marshal's baton for him), Bookshops are also selling Monash's own War Letters and his 1920 potboiler, The Australian Victories in France, a book that beat Charles Bean's official history by 20 years and set the popular interpretation of Monash-the-war-winner, a plot faithfully followed by his popular admiring biographers ever since. Now we have Grantlee Kieza's monumental Monash.

It was said that Monash was a better brigadier than he had been a battalion commander, and a better divisional commander than brigadier, and so on. With Monash biographies the opposite seems to be true, with each weaker than the one before. Kieza's massive effort is undermined by being written entirely in the present tense ("Monash's ears tingle at the praise" – no source given). This technique, often essayed by documentary-makers seeking "immediacy", soon loses its impact and novelty. Kieza relentlessly catalogues what Monash does but the very immediacy of the technique limits him offering the context or analysis it badly needs.

He trots out the tired old claims about Monash being an "outsider" – the Scotch College and Melbourne University graduate who by 1914 dined with prime ministers and earned 10 times the average salary. Of course, bigots made much of his German-Jewish background, but he still got a brigade in 1914, a division in 1916 and the Australian Corps in 1918. Kieza lazily repeats the easy boosting of the rehearsal/raid at Hamel, overlooking that Monash did not devise the plan and merely intelligently applied lessons learned by others over the previous three years – just as did his British and dominion contemporaries, though they are barely mentioned. Kieza claims that Monash "fought to save their lives", but more Australians died in 1918 than in 1916.

Kieza fails to ask the most basic critical questions, or to have read much of the necessary literature. For example, he disregards the evidence of Cecil Allanson​, the Gurkha officer who saw Monash collapse under strain in August 1915. To dismiss Allanson as "unreliable" merely on the say-so of Bill Slim (his own reputation for veracity now under a cloud) is not good enough. In more than 700 pages (a hundred more than Serle) he tells us nothing we haven't heard before. The book cover claim that Monash was "the soldier who built a nation" remains unjustified. The most critical insight we get is the occasional admission that Monash was prone to exaggerate the truth.

I so much wanted to say something positive about Kieza's Monash but honestly can't. He doesn't seem to have consulted any new sources, hasn't asked any new questions: hasn't said anything that hasn't been said before, and better. But good on him for persuading ABC Books that his book deserves to be puffed on the non-commercial broadcaster.